Save time researching old journals, magazines and newspapers with online archives that put ancestral answers a click away.

You've heard it before: Think like a historian. The period sources that social history researchers use can tell you a lot about your own ancestors' lives. But the idea of scrutinizing copy after copy of historical magazines, journals and newspapers would make most ancestor hunters groan.

Now you can stop bristling and start searching — online. It's easier than ever to mine historical and genealogical periodicals for family data, thanks to Web sites that let you access them from home and for a reasonable fee. No more painstaking scanning of pages — most digital archives offer full-text searching, and the pages appear online exactly as they do in the original. Try these three subscription sites to search periodicals from the past:

• The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) recently launched a new Web site with a searchable version of its New England Historical and Genealogical Register at <www.newenglandancestors.org>. The Register has published thousands of New England genealogies and is known for articles and historical transcriptions. The database covers 1847 to 1994.

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